2193 - The Two Pillars of Effective Leadership Revealed by Sylvie Di Giusto

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, we have a very fun guest. It's Sylvie DiGiusto. Sylvie, you are an, this is interesting. I've never had a guest who does this. You are an international 3D immersive holographic keynote speaker. And to our friend that's listening, you really need to see a video of what we're talking about. So you can appreciate what goes into this. This is really fantastic stuff. And it's so funny. like I'm watching video and like everyone's phones are up shooting video of you while you're doing this. Cause it really is kind of a cool experience, but Sylvie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Josh, for having me.

1:48It's an exciting day because I am the world's best podcast host today. That's a first for me. Later on today, I assume. I don't know who that might be. It's not me, but thank you for your kind words. Sylvie, before we get going, and I apologize, I didn't let you know about this ahead of time, but what do you do in your free time for fun that you're really passionate about that has nothing to do with work? It has nothing to do with personal development. It's just something that like maybe it's a TV show, movie, music, hobby, something that you're really passionate about. Every entrepreneur is just passionate about something else.

2:26So I am very blessed that like you I live in sunny Florida yeah but unlike you I have the ocean right in front of my door so my mornings usually start like this around 5 30 I grab a cup of coffee in my pajamas I walk out 30 steps step on my boat drive out in the dark wait until the sun rises and I do nothing People always ask me, what are you doing out there? And I say, nothing. I'm just sitting on my boat. No music, no phone, no nothing. I just look at the sky. And the only noise that I have around me is around 7 a.m. the dolphins wake up and come in and are so curious that they check out my boat.

3:15And then I hear them. And around 7.30, I return home. How does that sound? Sylvia, it sounds dreamlike. Life is but a dream in that visual that you just painted for us. But I want to ask you about what you just said there, because you said that you go out with the coffee and you, and I'm going to guess, you intentionally do nothing, right? And why is that so valuable? Because I know that you speak to a lot of leaders, and I would imagine that that's probably a message that you promote about, you know, taking in these quiet moments where we take, you know, take away the clutter, take away the noise, and we just allow ourselves to be in stillness and in the moment.

4:01Can you share maybe a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So I help leaders to understand how they perceive themselves and how the world perceives them. And during my own research since 2017, I have asked around 28 ,000 people, what is the number one trait you want to see and instantly experience in a leader? And the number one word, well, it always switches between two words. So I'm going to give you both. The number one word throughout the years always tends to be trust. I instantly want to trust a leader. And the other one is care. I instantly want to feel that a leader cares about me. So let me come back to the term care.

4:45There is a very simple concept how you can show others that you care and a very powerful one. the moment you take care of yourself first people assume you have the capability to take care of them too or i repeat that for you in a different way if you don't take care of yourself first people do not believe that you have the capability to take care of them too so i feel as a successful business owner, as a successful leader, we constantly take care of others first, right? It's our team, it's our company, it's our clients, it's our community, it's our family. And who is left over at the very end?

5:33It's ourself. And if we ignore the role and the responsibility that we have towards ourselves to actually take care of ourselves first so that we can serve others better. Yeah. I should point out, Sylvie, that you speak for the biggest of the big, right? American Airlines, the American Express, Bloomberg, Hilton, Microsoft, Nespresso, Nickelodeon, Prudential, the United States Air Force. What is it that – would you mind, as best as you can, describe your keynote experience that you bring? And again, I feel like we're doing our audio only listener a disservice because you have to see what it looks like when Sylvie waves her arms through the air and all of a sudden all of these fish are magically swimming throughout the air everywhere.

6:31I mean, it's truly amazing. Can I let you explain it? Oh, thank you very much. I want you to go to a conference with me for just a moment. And the typical conference goes like this. somebody from the company reads off an introduction, reads off an agenda, reads off some rules for the day. And then a speaker comes and shows some slides and tells some stories and add some facts and figures. And when you sit through a day of that experience, it is a really tough job to be an audience member. It's probably the toughest job from the entire conference. And I I realized very quickly audience members deserve more.

7:15They want to be part of the experience. So I always was dreaming of a way to bring the content with me on stage. And so what you need to imagine, I talk a lot about brain performance and what decisions our brains make in milliseconds. And rather than just showing you a brain on a slide, I project a 3D holographic brain onto the stage. and you and I can walk into it together and I can show you the parts that are engaged. And so what you notice is that all of this happens, first of all, in the dark, because the room has to be dark. It is such a magical experience. I have 100 % attention from all attendees.

8:06And rather than just hearing about my concepts, they are actually experiencing them and taking way more back out, way more things stick with them than bullet points on slides, as we all know. Well, they certainly are not looking at their phones. Sylvie, what are your main messages that you are bringing to audiences right now? And I know you touched on this a little bit already, but I'm hoping maybe you could give us a little bit more of a taste of what someone might experience when they see you live, given I think there's so much turbulence going on right now. There's a lot of uncertainty as of when we're recording this.

8:50And there's a lot to distract us. AI is revolutionizing not just business, but our personal lives in a way that's just accelerating so rapidly. There's so much going on. Sylvie, guide us through the storm here. The digital transformation makes it very clear that a lot of the things we are doing logistically or in the background with processes will be exchanged with automations in the future. The more important it is that we prepare the humans in the workplace, your teams in your companies for what really matters. And that is the human interaction they have with their clients or customers. Now during that human interaction, they need to be aware that humans think less rational than we believe that they think.

9:42We think that our clients read our websites, we think that they compare our prices, that they compare the details, the features, and to a certain amount, degree, they actually do that. But we know that our brains, every single second, transmits 11 million pieces of information. so it's totally overwhelmed and only five percent of those 11 million bits of information get transmitted in a conscious way and i help audiences to understand what happens in the other 95 percent of the brain which is your subconscious mind how can you make people feel something and influence that process that they feel that you are the right person to work with and the only person to work with how can we influence their unconscious biases we all have you and i we are biased that's just how we are built as human beings to our advantage so that they make the decisions influenced by our guidance and this is not about making somebody make a decision they didn't want to make it's just putting to the forefront your human elements and your human power that you have in combination, of course, with the data facts and figures that you always have to deliver in a second step.

11:09Sylvie, aside from keynote speaking, how else do you inspire or work with individuals or clients? or do you do any, do you do work or provide consulting, coaching, anything like that? I am very blessed that I'm very much full year requested with a keynote speaking. And my calendar is very much either filled up with keynote speaking or with boating to see dolphins. So I very much focus on that part of my business. And I have written 13 books throughout the year. Wow. So I would say my second path down is to be an author. I do a lot of online, a lot of online courses. I had to admit that I'm a horrible coach, for example.

12:02But it's also good if you know what you are not good at, because I'm not somebody who is good in hand-holding. I like to tell you this is the direction, this is the facts and figures, and now go figure it out and go on this adventure. And I'm always here if you need me, but I'm not somebody who is really good in, you know, hand-holding and tapping you all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk about your book series, all available on Amazon, bestsellers, and they fall under the brand of the image of leadership. And I love this because you have the image of leadership in hospitality, in real estate, in healthcare, in sales for women.

12:49What is the premise behind the image of leadership? The image of leadership describes my framework, how you can create an image of leadership to be perceived as a leader within and outside an organization with the tools that you already have, with your appearance, with your behavior, with your communication, with your digital footprint, and with the environment you surround yourself. Now, just like with my keynotes, I believe that my clients deserve customization to a high level. Even if some of my keynotes always have a core part, I'm known for customizing every single keynote to make sure that it meets the needs of my audiences.

13:37And at one point, I had to realize I'm not doing this for my books. I'm just writing a book, assuming that the real estate agent finds in that book. the same input and valuable insights that the hospitality leader might find. And so I committed to the same promise with my books and decided to write special editions for all the wonderful industries I am so blessed to speak for. And that's why you find a lot of different editions of this book online. All right. So the book series, by the way, it's called The Image of Leadership. And when someone reads, and again, I would encourage folks to look at, I mean, there's, again, I can continue on, financial services, retail and consumer goods, public sector, technology, industrial.

14:32for leadership in the new, like in this day moving forward, if you were to, you know, again, share or kind of expand on this a bit for the responsibility that we have as leaders, what are you seeing as a priority for the future? So in this book, I very much dive also into the digital transformation. We go move forward. We're already in the middle of it, in the middle of that storm. So can you just imagine, I mean, what has changed in the last two years? What is going to change just in the next half year? And as leaders and business owners, I want you to be aware when it comes to your image of leadership that very often we think of the in-person interactions.

15:18And unfortunately, that is not true anymore, because most interactions we now have in some sort of digital way. And very often leaders underestimate the digital responsibility that they have nowadays, also by crafting a professional identity for themselves. And that starts with the digital profiles they built for themselves. That starts with how they respond online to posts. That goes to how they respond to emails, what they send out that can be forwarded and forwarded and forwarded. You don't even know if you lose business today because somebody has a note from you that wasn't even thought. I think throughout the past years with our digital presence, we have always made the mistake as business owners to focus on how much business could we make.

16:17You know, we are so focused on posting and sharing and advertising with the goal. I want more business. I want more likes. I want more shares. I want more saves. But we never ask ourselves how much business did we actually lose because of our digital interactions? Because that's a number we can't calculate. But ask yourself, how many people did not call you today? Maybe because they explored you online and found something in your digital presence that told them you are not the right leader to engage with. You are not the right business owner to engage with. Yeah. Well, Sylvie, I mean, what mistakes should we not be making in our digital presence?

17:06Well, you want your digital presence certainly not be a fake version of the version that you will present in real life, right? But it should instantly imprint the values and beliefs that you have as an individual. It should instantly show the authority and credibility that you bring to the table and your focus in the industry that you have. and it should also show your personality i think that was a huge change throughout the last one two years that we all got tired of those picture perfect polished social media profiles of business leaders and ceos and thought leaders what matters more nowadays is the person behind the brand right and how they represent their products and their service and i think what you should not do is to let it control you you have to control the narrative that is out there and if you don't control it then somebody else will so own all your handles on the internet own your name on something that most underestimate even if you don't use all the platforms you need your to own your name on all the platforms because otherwise one day somebody else could do it right control what is out there and not just your what i call the intentional footprint but also the unintentional footprint and with that i mean the messages that you send in between the lines gold is your linkedin profile picture?

18:56Is that really the person that shows up, right? Or how often are you online? We all have that one friend that fills up our feed where we think, do you even have a job? Or why are you posting 17 times per day? So there are a lot of subtle messages that we send in between the lines that we are often not aware of how much they actually influence the way we are perceived online. Sylvie DiGiusto, your website, sylviediagisto.com, which we have linked up, the book series, The Image of Leadership. Friends, I'm telling you, go to the website right now so you can see what it looks like to experience a 3D immersive keynote speaker in the way that Sylvie and her team are able to pull off.

19:42It's amazing. Sylvie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. And see, I told you, you are the best podcast host out there. Oh, you're so kind. Thank you.

19:59Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

20:40I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

21:22I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.